Where mobile telephones were perhaps viewed by many as a luxury when first introduced into the marketplace, they are today viewed by our society as very important, convenient, and useful tools. A great number of people now carry their mobile devices with them wherever they go. This popularity of wireless communication has spawned a multitude of new wireless systems, devices, protocols, etc. Consumer demand for advanced wireless functions and capabilities has also fueled a wide range of technological advances in the utility and capabilities of wireless devices. Wireless/mobile devices not only allow voice communication, but also facilitate messaging, multimedia communications, e-mail, Internet browsing, and access to a wide range of wireless applications and services.
An incredible amount of content, applications, services, and the like is already available for use on wireless devices. However, the quantity of information that will be accessible to mobile terminals will increase significantly in the coming years, as further technological advances will continue to diminish the gap between desktop and wireless units. For example, the use of mobile terminals such as digital cameras and mobile telephones that include digital camera functionality has significantly increased in recent years. And with the significant in crease in the use of digital cameras and mobile telephones with such functionality, the quality of images taken or captured by such cameras and mobile telephones has also significantly increased. For example, widely available digital cameras and mobile telephones including such fluctionality have, or in the near future are expected to have, the capability to create tens of mega-bits of content, which can be stored by the camera or mobile telephone, respectively.
Thus, while access to this plethora of information is exciting to the mobile world, storing the desired information and utilizing the various access techniques for transferring, or more particularly uploading, the desired information can become burdensome to the casual mobile terminal user. In this regard, the increase in the quantity of information that is and will be accessible to and/or stored by mobile terminals can place a heavy storage capacity burden on such mobile terminals. In mobile terminals that also operate as telecom devices, content storage is a particularly important issue since users expect sufficiently reasonable storage capacity for necessary communication purposes which they expect to be available.
To relieve at least a portion of the storage capacity burden on mobile terminals, techniques have been developed whereby mobile terminals are capable of transferring, or uploading, content from mobile terminals to servers or the like with increased storage capacity. As will be appreciated, however, such techniques can also have drawbacks. Whereas conventional techniques for uploading content are adequate, such techniques have a drawback in that they are limited in the amount of available control over the uploading of content. According to conventional uploading techniques, control over the uploading of content is typically limited. In this regard, conventional uploading techniques typically allow only very limited control over the time and manner of uploading content. For example, conventional techniques typically do not permit terminal users to tailor content uploading according to state of the network, such as network congestion. It would therefore be advantageous to have even more robust forms of upload control, especially for content that may take a while to upload and which senders and/or recipients might therefore want to be careful about transmitting and/or receiving, respectively, if the only available channel is an expensive channel.
Further, many conventional techniques for uploading content over the air assume, at least to some extent, that such content is uploaded in one communication, or uploading, session. For example, conventional Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) techniques for uploading content in accordance with the Over the Air (OTA) protocol assume, at least to some extent, that such content is uploaded in one uploading session. However, if the mobile terminal is uploading large content, the time to upload the content typically increases, thus increasing the cost of uploading the content, as well as the probability that the mobile terminal will encounter some type of error or interruption in transmission during the uploading process. For example, end users can interrupt the transmission of uploaded content if such end users desire to utilize the mobile terminal for an alternative purpose, such as to operate an application other than that required for uploading the content. Also, for example, an unexpected event, such as client error (e.g., dead battery, halt, crash, etc.) or network failure (e.g., out of the geographic coverage area, etc.) can interrupt the uploading of content.
Conventionally, when content is uploaded in a single uploading session, if an error or interruption in transmission occurs during the uploading process, the mobile terminal must restart the uploading process to completely upload the content. For example, if a mobile terminal encounters an error or other interruption in uploading content having a size of thirty-two mega-bytes over a General Packet Radio Services (GPRS) network, the mobile terminal typically must restart the upload to receive the content, even if the mobile terminal had already uploaded a significant portion of the content before the error or interruption. Several techniques, such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) techniques, have been developed to recover an uploading session that has encountered an error or interruption. Such techniques, however, are not designed for wireless network environments. Also, such techniques are merely designed to recover an uploading session that has encountered a network connection error (e.g., modem failure) and do not permit the recovery of uploading sessions that are halted for other reasons.